Since it was acquired by global Internet giant Yahoo! last year, Koprol, Indonesia’s first location-based social networking site, has enjoyed a 20-fold increase in its users to 1.5 million globally, with Indonesians comprising 90 percent of its membership.

“Koprol is already widely used in America, Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam, but between 80 percent and 90 percent of Koprol’s users are from Indonesia,” Satya Witoelar, cofounder of Yahoo! Koprol, told reporters at Yahoo! Indonesia’s office in Jakarta on Thursday.

Satya said that Koprol had attracted mostly young people of between 15 and 24 years old, who mostly accessed Koprol from mobile devices.

“Those between 15 and 20 are mostly female and those between 20 and 24 mostly male,” he added.

The social networking site, which is now known as Yahoo! Koprol, has managed to generate 3,000 business profiles, mostly small- or medium-size enterprises, from its “Koprol for Business” feature, which was launched in February.

Koprol for Business allows users, such as business owners and potential buyers, to interact with each other either through mobile phones or personal computers, and therefore cut marketing costs.

Satya declined to reveal the exact number of new users Koprol was targeting to attract this year. However, marking its first anniversary, Koprol introduced a new interface and features.

The new features include “Onboarding” for easy check-ins, “People Finder” to connect with people in the vicinity and “Hovercard”, which enables users to find the profile informations of another user’s “avatar” without having to visit individual profile pages.

It also now has a Koprol widget to enable the creation and addition of widgets to profiles or blogs.

“Our new ‘Hot-Tags’ also consolidates content on popular topics or events to reflect the collective mood, while the ‘Koprol Stamp’ feature serves as a fun element that rewards users for being social with Koprol users,” Satya said,.“Koprol’s fresh interface appears the same both on Web and mobile, so it has a consistent look across platforms,” he said.

Koprol is a location-based micro-blogging site that keeps people informed about the latest events. It was specifically created for mobile devices.

According to Nielsen, Indonesia’s mobile user population has grown to 53 percent during the last four years and, according to Yahoo!-TNS Net Index Study 2011, almost 60 percent of Indonesian Internet users have adopted mobile Internet, ranking Indonesia as one of the highest in Southeast Asia for mobile Internet use.

According to internetworldstats.com, as of March, there were 39.6 million Internet users in Indonesia, or 16.1 percent of the country’s population, the highest among Southeast Asian countries. (swd)